FLICKR, NIAIDA bacterium found in the healthy oral microbiome turns out to capable of unsavory behavior: abetting a pathogen. Researchers at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin reported last month (June 28) in mBio that Streptococcus gordonii provides oxygen to Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans which can infect tooth, gum, and other tissues.
This is the first time a normally harmless mouth bacterium has been shown to change a pathogen’s metabolism to make the microbe more dangerous, Vanessa Sperandio of the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not a part of the study, told Science News.
“Historically, we tend to think of infections as caused by a single organism, but many diseases are caused by multiple species,” Apollo Stacy, a graduate student who led the work, said in a statement.
Members of Stacy’s research group—in the UT lab of Marvin Whiteley—had previously observed the different bacteria cohabiting the same wounds, and that these species were intimately associated: S. gordonii fed A. actinomycetemcomitans with L-lactate, a carbon source the pathogen prefers.
But effective lactate respiration depends on ...
